After the Gaza genocide, Palestine is humanity's litmus test

Three years after the 7 October 2023 Hamas-led offensive into southern Israel, the motivations and objectives of the attack remain unclear.

It is now a matter of record that negotiations between Hamas and Israel, mediated primarily by Egypt and Qatar, were ongoing throughout 2023 and had reached an advanced stage. The negotiators had agreed on a text and were on the cusp of producing an agreement, but at the last moment Israel’s leadership got cold feet.

The various warnings Israel received during the Autumn of 2023 were primarily intended to persuade the Israeli government to accept what its negotiators had agreed to, because the alternative would be renewed hostilities. The Israeli security establishment responded with a proposal to conduct a wave of assassinations against the Palestinian leadership in the Gaza Strip, but this was rejected by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on the grounds that the status quo had served Israel well for many years and should therefore be indefinitely prolonged.

Were the Palestinians seeking to compel Israel to stop dithering and consummate the agreement on the table? Was the Hamas leadership abandoning a process in which it lost faith, instead seeking leverage in the form of captured Israeli soldiers to force Israel into an exchange of prisoners? Or was it determined to shatter the status quo irrevocably?

It is difficult to answer this question with confidence because the October attacks succeeded beyond Hamas’s expectations. Israel was caught completely unprepared, its forces collapsed like a house of cards, and the resulting carnage eliminated the prospect of a renewal of the negotiations.

Hamas acted unilaterally, and it appears doubtful that it anchored its initiative in an expectation that its regional partners, with whom it had not coordinated, would join its campaign. More likely, it anticipated a furious Israeli response that, albeit on a larger scale than previous Israeli assaults on the Gaza Strip, would, like them, eventually run its course.

This also shaped Hamas’s strategic approach, and there is little evidence it seriously prepared for alternative scenarios.

Israel’s calculations were of course entirely different. If in October 1973 it could at least ascribe its failures to a coordinated operation by two powerful regular armies supplied by the Soviet superpower, in 2023 it faced a more severe crisis. The unprecedented attacks were conducted within its own boundaries, and were administered by a modestly armed militia operating from a besieged, postage-stamp-sized territory Israel had dominated since the 1960s.

Consumed by maniacal bloodlust and a determination to exact revenge on an unprecedented scale in order to restore its power of deterrence, that same day Israel responded with a self-consciously genocidal campaign that continues to this day.

Within the Gaza Strip, Israel’s objectives have graduated from indiscriminate mass slaughter, to making the territory unfit for human habitation, to physically erasing it from the map.

Remaking the region

With its security doctrine in tatters, yet fortified with the unconditional assistance of the United States, and the active complicity or passive acquiescence of most Western states, Israel, beginning in 2024, also set out to remake the entire region. Henceforth, Israel would work not only to eliminate the capabilities of its enemies but also to ensure that they lacked the means to develop capabilities that could threaten the Zionist state.

This mission would not be complete without dismantling the Islamic Republic of Iran, and in Donald Trump, Israel finally found its mark.

Yet Israel’s greatest success also proved to be a turning point. What was intended as the final act in a campaign to impose unchallenged regional hegemony instead exposed the limits of Israeli power, and more importantly precipitated the decline of US power in the Middle East and arguably the beginning of the end of the US global empire.

Closer to home, the Gaza Genocide has for the majority of humanity transformed Israel into an irredeemably toxic entity.

Since at least 1967, the Zionist state has been exempt from the rules and standards every other member of the international community is expected to observe and respect. Any and every effort to hold Israel to account for its expanding crimes and savagery was discredited, denounced, delegitimised, and demonised as an illegitimate initiative, motivated by Jew hatred, to hold the survivors of the Holocaust, the only democracy in the Middle East, and the most moral army in the solar system to an impossibly high double standard.

Decades of such impunity set the stage for the Gaza Genocide, and arguably made it inevitable. Yet two years of live-streamed slaughter, and the shameless pride and glee its perpetrators took in their barbarity, have decisively turned the tables. So much so that candidates for political office in the United States who heretofore lived in terror of AIPAC and would sell their mothers to obtain its endorsement, today derive political advantage from publicly renouncing it.

Confronted with this definitive and irreversible loss of the public square, Israel and its apologists have resorted to measures generally associated with totalitarian states to enforce compliance. Yet this methodology too has failed, even as Israel and the US seek to dismantle international institutions that refuse to do their bidding.

As the genocide enters its fourth year, two clocks are ticking. The first is Israel’s race against time to eradicate the Palestine question and establish its sovereignty over the entirety of the country before the end of the Trump administration. The second, slower one, is translating Israel’s pariah status in world opinion into policy changes by governments. Slowly, but surely, the second clock is advancing, and when it strikes midnight, Israel’s game will be up.

In 2026, the struggle for justice in Palestine has become a litmus test, not only for basic morality and decency, but also for a politician’s integrity on other issues.

The tragedy is that the Palestinian national movement remains in disarray, unable to arrest and reverse its advanced state of disintegration. A credible leadership, with a coherent strategy, capable of mobilising its own people and inspiring the confidence of the multitudes who support them, is vital if the second clock is to have a winning chance of overtaking the first.

Mouin Rabbani is Managing Editor of Jadaliyya and author of Gaza Apocalypse (OR Books 2026).

Follow Mouin on X: @MouinRabbani

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Opinions expressed in this article remain those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The New Arab, its editorial board or staff.